When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

In 2021, Caesar Nafrada and Joseph Caddell wrote “‘Never Thought They Could Pull Off Such an Attack’: Prejudice and Pearl Harbor,” where they argued that Pearl Harbor proves just how dangerous ethnocentric bias brought on by largely homogenous institutions can be. Having seen these biases play out in recent conflicts, we invited Caesar and Joseph back to reflect on their article.Read more below:Image: The U.S. National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons.In your 2021 article, “‘Never Thought They Could Pull Off Such an Attack’: Prejudice and Pearl Harbor,” you argue that certain U.S. decision-makers’ “underestimation and misunderstanding” of Japanese military capability led, in part, to the failure to foresee the attack on Pearl Harbor. Are there any areas today where the United States is continuing to underestimate or misunderstand an adversary? As our article described, there were individuals in U.S. intelligence who possessed the right background and knowledge to understand the nature of the Japanese threat — individuals who particularly understood the conventional threat posed by Japanese forces and not just unproven suspicions of “saboteurs.” Yet there were insufficient numbers of these individuals in key decision-making positions in 1941 to break the ethnocentrist groupthink that contributed to the U.S. defense posture on Oahu being focused on sabotage — and they failed to prepare seriously for a long-range Japanese strike.China is one obvious peer-competitor adversary that U.S. analysts and leaders are in danger of misunderstanding. Hopefully, the United States has learned from its history and can avoid the ethnocentric generalizations that hampered decision-makers in the past. However, focus on “great-power competition” can easily fixate Americans on China’s threat at the expense of one of the hallmarks of diverse teams: the dissenting voice. Posturing for China requires such a unified effort from the U.S. national security apparatus that it may inadvertently over-rely on “like-minded thinkers.”